Nagorno-Karabakh death toll exceeds 4,600 after Azerbaijan declared its losses

The death toll from the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and its neighbor Armenia over the disputed Nagorno Karabakh region rose to more than 4,600 people on Thursday, after Baku announced its losses.

The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense said in a statement: “During the heroic war, 2,783 members of our armed forces were killed”.

Armenia said it had identified 1,746 of its soldiers who were killed during the six weeks of fighting, which erupted in late September and ended with the signing of a peace deal last month.

More than 130 civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the United Nations said in an assessment last month, citing reports from both sides.

This was the bloodiest fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia since the two countries fought a war against each other in the early 1990s, when they turned into two independent states in the midst of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The United Nations considers the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which has been largely controlled by Christian Armenian forces for decades, as part of Muslim-majority Azerbaijan.

Armenia was forced to give up control of more than 120 sites in the region in favor of Azerbaijan under the new peace agreement, which the two countries agreed to and Russia, the regional power in the region, on November 9.